Installing Entertainer 0.3

My previous post on installing Entertainer proved to be quite popular. Since quite a bit has changed in Entertainer between 0.1 and 0.3, I’ve decided it would be worth writing the instructions again to prevent confusion. However, for the benefit of people who never see my blog but will visit Entertainer’s Lauchpad page, I have decided to provide the instructions as a FAQ in the team’s Answers section.

Please visit the FAQ for how to install Entertainer 0.3. My apologies for the redirection, but it is for the benefit of many.

Coming Soon, Entertainer 0.2

Yeah, yeah, we missed our milestone deadline of 9-26-08, but we’re close to getting 0.2 finished.

For those of you looking for a lot of new flashiness and cool user interface features, I’m afraid 0.2 won’t have a ton to offer. With some contributions from new developers, we have added some features like a photo slideshow capability and a quit screen.

Most of our core developers, however, have been focusing on a lot of code refactoring under the hood. In the long term this refactoring will enable us to get features done more quickly and in a testable way, so we can verify everything we code. About 95% of my work for this release probably falls into this category, so I’m afraid I can’t really boast about anything visible that I’ve done this time around. I did fix some text jaggies on some of the menus (*yawn*, boring, I know).

Before you go away sulking from the lack of new bling, take heart at some of the cool things that we have done:

• Thanks to Josh and the efforts of some other contributors, Entertainer has support for language translations! I, unfortunately, am a bum American who can only speak English (and a bit of very broken Spanish), but many other people will be able to enjoy Entertainer in their native language. Our translation page indicates that we have 100% translation of English, French, German, and Swedish. We also have partials translations in plenty of others. That rocks! I’m sure we’ll have to start focusing on translation quality in the future since there are no restrictions on who can translate, but, hey, it’s a pretty good start.
• Paul is dangerously close to getting a package put together. This is great news for users because it will mean that you can install Entertainer from a package in one of launchpad’s Personal Package Archives (PPA). For Ubuntu/Debian users, this will mean no more need to download the source code and run Entertainer directly from source. For non-Ubuntu/Debian users, we have will have a source package that can be used for your distro packaging (anybody willing to step up to the plate?). I think we’ll have a lot of polishing to do, but I am pumped about this because it should open the doors for a lot of users who were scared of running Entertainer from our source tree.

I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that we release 0.2 this weekend (the 4th and 5th). Keep your eyes on this space or over at our launchpad page for official announcements. I’ll also write a post about how to install 0.2 later which will hopefully include instructions about how to install from a PPA.

Entertainer Media Center 0.1 is released into the wild!

As an Entertainer Developer, I’m very proud to get our first big release out the door! 0.1 is the culmination of a lot of hard work over the past few weeks months.

It’s quite a feat to develop and release software and the effort was only made possible by the hard work of Jamie Bennett, Michael Charclo, Paul Hummer, Joshua Scotton, Lauri Taimila, and myself, our helpful bug reporters and alpha testers, and some great development tools like launchpad, bazaar, and pylint.

Since this is my first release experience as a part of an open source, community driven team, this code will probably be special to me, warts and all. I want to thank all the guys listed above for their help in making me a better developer and answering my (sometimes foolish) questions. I think we have a good community growing here and I’m looking forward to many more releases in the future.

Download the release here.

.1 is coming! .1 is coming!

The Entertainer developers have scheduled our first release for June 14th. As with lots of other open source projects, our .1 release is meant to be a preview release to get the software out to many users and get feedback, testing, questions, and, of course, new bug reports.

As you can see from our bugs list for milestone .1 (found here), we are getting very close to fixing all the things we committed to for this release. There will still be some big known issues (like a black blank screen for some/all 64 bit users), but we think that release early and often is good idea and will help us refine Entertainer to be an even better media center.

Keep your eyes peeled for release information from our launchpad page or from the development mailing list (entertainer-dev (at) lists (dot) ironlionsoftware (dot) com).